Act III

March 27, 2008

Dear readers,

My father got off work at the Southeast Missourian every day as the paper rolled off the press. As my mother, my baby brother and I waited for him in the car on Lorimier Street, the acidic smell of freshly inked newsprint charged out of the pressroom window only a few feet away and filled our nostrils. Some sort of imprinting must have occurred.

I live on Lorimier Street now, only four blocks from the newspaper. Like a homing pigeon, I have left periodically for forays into the yonder only to return with messages to this grand newspaper building I know as well as my own house.

In college I covered my alma mater Central High School's sports teams, I hoped objectively, but you know how that is. The newsroom was on the top floor then. I climbed the front stairs every Saturday morning at 8 to deliver my precious account of the previous night's game to sports editor Ray Owen. In those days I could stare at a blank page for an hour searching for a dazzling lead. Sometimes my mother awakened me slumped over my typewriter with no time to do anything except tell what happened. That turned out to be a useful lesson.

The Southeast Missourian gave me full-time jobs three times: Once after graduating from Southeast, later on after graduating from Mizzou, and finally after I'd spent 15 years on a newsman's odyssey up and down California beach towns and to frigid upstate New York.

In the span of just a few years in the 1970s newspaper technology transformed from hot lead to cold type and then computers, marginalizing the back shop workers whose skills had been so critical to the art and craft of printing. Many of those people who used to work in the composing room had known me since I was a little boy. We were family. Seeing the jobs they'd been so proud of taken over by machines was disconcerting.

I have loved being a reporter, though I'm a better writer than reporter. I've worked with fine reporters who are like lions chasing wild game. They don't stop until they are lapping blood. The game is not sport for them. They keenly feel the need to right wrongs.

That taste for the jugular is missing in me. Instead I have been drawn to stories about the foibles and nobility that are our salvation. For me stories about people who work hard and love harder turned out to be the best stories of all.

Joni Mitchell was my muse when I was young. Her song "Amelia," an elegy for the lost aviatrix and others like her, is a favorite. I especially love this part: "People will tell you where they've gone/ They'll tell you where to go/ But till you get there yourself you never really know."

I've never really known where I was going, instead have been like our late beloved beagle Alvie, who went wherever his nose led. Sometimes Alvie got lost. More often his path was filled with surprises.

Now my nose is pointing elsewhere. I'll still be in Cape Girardeau. My work will still be here every Thursday morning and in the pages of the newspaper's entertainment magazine. Occasionally I hope to contribute the kind of stories writer Tracy Kidder calls "mortal dramas."

I just won't be here in this building filled with so many friendly ghosts.

Every life has a third act if you live long enough. Mine will involve attempting not to flinch if someone calls me "professor."

Thirty years ago one of my heroes gave me a book of his poetry with the inscription "Journalism doesn't triumph." He feared I was too idealistic about the profession. Yet he has spent most of the years since then in Chiapas, Mexico, chronicling the Indians' rebellion against the powerful.

Even journalists who believe journalism doesn't triumph believe it ought to.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.